Basic HTML Version
21
City & Village Tours: 0845 812 5000 info@cityandvillagetours.com
a shard of glass through the heart of historic
London
.
The View From The Shard on the 68
th
and 72
nd
floors is now open to the public every day from
9am to 10pm with last entry at 8.30pm. Are you
taking your group? Before I proceed I should make
it clear that City & Village Tours aren’t selling
tickets or organizing trips to The Shard. Individual
tickets booked in advance are £25.95. Pre-booked
group tickets are also £25.95. There are no group
discounts, no concessions and all tickets must be
paid for at the time of purchase, with no refunds
available thereafter. That’s a layout of over £1300
for a full coach. You can turn up and buy a ticket
on the day for the next available time slot (entry is
on the hour and half hour) for £29.95 or you can
be really spontaneous and turn up on a whim and
go straight up to the top for £100 each! There is
capacity for up to 400 visitors each hour – that’s
a staggering £95,000 a day in the till! Ticket prices
are valid to 31 October 2013 – surely to goodness
they couldn’t go up?
One To Do On Your Own
For practical information about taking your group
to visit The View at The Shard, including where to
get on and off the coach and ideas to make a day of
it please see this month’s
One To On Your Own
on
page 28. But before you do, read on to discover the
story of
Hankey’s Mansions
, the Babylonian flats
of Petty France that, like The Shard, polarised
public opinion when they were built in 1873.
Queen Anne Mansions built to the giddy heights
of 12 and later 14 floors upset the establishment so
much that laws were hurriedly passed to stop any
other Johnny-come-lately from building so tall.
These laws stayed on the statute books for 100
years and it was only when they were repealed in
the 1960s that London started growing upwards in
a chain of events that has brought us to The Shard.
The Devil’s Very Own Gnomon
When Queen Anne Mansions went up, not far from
St James’s Park, Queen Victoria complained that she
could no longer see the Palace of Westminster from
Buckingham Palace. I’ve not read any reports about
The Shard from our own Royal architectural expert,
HRH the Prince of Wales, but I’m betting folding
money that he isn’t a fan. I can imagine him in his
slippers at Clarence House shaking the newspaper in
irritation and telling Camilla all about it. What might
he say? I’m guessing something like
“
the Devil’s own
gnomon casting its bloody shadow across the capital
”
Sorry if you have to look up gnomon. Blame Charles!
Hankey’s Mansions
When a banker called Henry Alers Hankey bought a site
in Petty France near St James’s Park and built a 12
(later 14) story block of flats, the tallest building in the
UK, which he called Queen Anne Mansions, the
Metropolitan Board of Works just couldn’t stop him.
Not even in the wake of awful fires like the one on
Tooley Street in 1861 and By Jove they tried. The
dashing head of the Metropolitan Fire Brigade Captain
Massey Shaw (who was immortalised by Gilbert &
Sullivan in their operetta
Iolanthe
) was encouraged to
agree that his appliances would be unable to
‘throw a jet
of water to the top of Queen Anne’s Mansions’
and that
‘the building would be entirely destroyed if it depended
upon a jet being thrown from the ground level to the top
storeys’.
But the Board’s jurisdiction was limited to
public buildings and not even the inclusion of an hotel
at Queen Anne Mansions qualified it as a public
building. The building went up and for a while it
spread sideways and up until they put paid to that.
Insults were thrown at these
Babylonian flats
, The
Saturday Review said it looked unstable and resembled
an ugly spinning mill. Typical for the breed, thick
skinned and unrepentant, the developer Hankey brushed
off these insults as
“
written by a lady”.
Queen Anne